Enceladus

Enceladus

A nice image of the moon Enceladus seen with the back drop of the planet Saturn. This is the same sort of alignment Cassini was in to get the image of Tethys and Mimas posted here a last week (see Ring Shadows).

Enceladus is 504 km / 313 miles across and Cassini was 948,000 km / 589,000 miles away (about twice the Earth – Moon distance) so we can see how massive Saturn is. Learn more about Enceladus here,

Aside from Enceladus, the image shows wonderful detail in Saturn’s atmosphere. In particular the two dark round spots (center and upper right) and the interesting cloud feature about half way between Enceladus and the larger round spot. The cloud features look like they are rising vertically from the planet but probably are not. The round spots are disturbances in the atmosphere, much like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot only smaller.

Click the image to get a larger version and it scales pretty well so if you download it you can make it larger yet. You can get a full-res version and more details at the “Mighty Little Dot“.